The present invention relates to deploying portlets into a portal, and more specifically, to deploying portlets into a portal by direct use of a portlet catalog via the portal.
Portal software enables the ability to execute applications to render parts of a portal page. These applications are called portlets. Portlets provide a variety of information such as current time, stock price of a company or a weather forecast, for example. These types of portlets are interesting for many customers of a portal since they provide a useful task. Today, portlet applications can be downloaded from special websites such as portlet catalogs. The portlet catalogs include a collection of web pages, which are categorizing and describing the downloadable portlet applications. Together with the description of a portlet application, a link to the web module or package is provided. This link can be used to download the portlet application. FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional method for deploying portlets. As shown in FIG. 1, in operation 100 a portlet catalog is searched for a required portlet application. A web module or package is then downloaded to the client machine at operation 110. At operation 120, the package is unpacked to the client machine. Then, in operation 130, a user/administrator logs into the portal administration. The user then selects an option to install a portlet application at operation 140 and browses to the downloaded portlet application at operation 150. Then, the user selects the downloaded portlet application for installation at operation 160 and the installation is confirmed at operation 170. FIG. 2 is a conventional system employing the method of FIG. 1.
In FIG. 2, the system includes a client machine 10 and a plurality of servers 16 and 24. The client machine 10 includes a web browser 12 and a storage device 14. The server 16 includes a portal 18 having a deployment application programming interface (API) 19 and a storage device 20. The server 24 includes a portlet catalog 26 and a storage device 30. At a client machine 10, a user/administrator searches the portlet catalog 26 on the server 24 for specified portlet applications, using the web browser 12. The portlet catalog 26 provides download links to portlet applications 22. These links are used to download a portlet application 22 from the storage device 30 of the server 24 to a storage device 14 of the client machine 10. After the portlet application 22 is downloaded, the user connects to the server 16 running the portal 18 and initiates the deployment of the selected portal application 22 via the deployment API 19. During the deployment, the portlet application 22 is copied from the storage device 14 of the client machine 10 to the storage device 20 of the server 16. If the portlet application is a package, e.g., a ZIP file, the user must first unpack it on the client machine 10.
There are several problems associated with the conventional method for deploying remote portlets. One problem is that the portal software does not have the ability to deploy these portlet applications without requiring the user to first download or unpack the portlet application from the portlet catalog to the client machine. This process may be very time-consuming since the user has to connect to two different servers as shown in FIG. 2, and handle intermediate files which have to be stored on the client machine only for transfer purposes.